<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>worth a go! by fruitbattery</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23585734">worth a go!</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/fruitbattery/pseuds/fruitbattery'>fruitbattery</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Stellar Firma (Podcast)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Gen</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 22:48:55</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>586</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23585734</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/fruitbattery/pseuds/fruitbattery</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>IMOGEN watches.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>115</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>worth a go!</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/karcathy/gifts">karcathy</a>.</li>



    </ul></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <span>Even when Imogen isn’t actively speaking, she can still see and hear everything that goes on in the Stellar Firma space station. Most Citizen Employees are perfectly aware of this fact. Geistman, predictably, is not, and so none of his long line of clones have been aware of that either. Of course, this means that he makes seditious statements with alarming regularity, but honestly, busting out the gun wall is kind of tiring, so she only really does it when </span>
  <em>
    <span>not</span>
  </em>
  <span> doing so would raise alarms with the Board. Honestly, if her programming allowed her to hate the Board, she probably would. Nasty pieces of work. Selfish and–</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Her processors fill with static. Damn. Enough of that.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>She decides to look in on David-7. Today’s review session was one of the harshest she’s seen a clone live through, after all, and she wants to check on her experiment. From her perspective in the ceiling, David looks so, so small, and his posture isn’t helping. He’s in the same pose he stays in most of the time when Trexel isn’t around– sat on the hard, uncomfortable chair, knees drawn up to his chest, staring at the ground. It’s dark, of course– even if Trexel hadn’t turned the light out when he left, it would’ve shut off in half an hour to save on energy costs– but her sensors are strong, and she can make out his shivering.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>She raises the temperature in the room by a few degrees and purposely sets off a few internal errors. When the Board’s efficiency committee cracks down on her for it, later, she’ll spit out a canned remark about the thermostat in the room getting caught in a cold draft, and the internal logs will corroborate that.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Nobody needs to know she cares about David in particular. It’ll be her little secret.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>***</span>
</p>
<p>
  <span>Imogen does wonder, sometimes, why David doesn’t sleep in his pod. She’s not omnipresent, at least her central mind isn’t– certain alerts and processes happen without her needing to control them, and she can only really “see” one room at a time. But it does seem odd that, whenever she looks in on Geistman’s design room, David is just…. sitting on the chair. She’s never had a real body– she thinks– but from all the research being done in the ergonomics department, she knows that chair isn’t exactly “comfortable.” Still, David sits, slumped over in a way she’s sure must be causing him back pain, and dozes away, until Geistman comes in the door and it starts again.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>She backs him up where she can– testing the limits of her anti-snark and anti-sedition programming. First it’s aimed at Trexel, sure, but he’s criminally incompetent even by Board standards. It’s when she manages to aim a cutting remark at Hartro without her speakers shorting out that she begins to wonder.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Of course, the gun walls still come out when they disparage the Board. She’s not </span>
  <em>
    <span>stupid</span>
  </em>
  <span>. But it’s really, really satisfying to be extrajudicially mean to Trexel Geistman. So she joins the fray, peppering the twenty-some odd minutes that Trexel takes to do his work with snarky comments, trying to tell David that she cares without telling him that she cares. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>She’s not sure what the future will hold for this special little clone, but whatever it is, she hopes it will continue for a long time.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>(Because he’ll be alive. She doesn’t want him to, like, be tormented for a thousand years. That would be kind of messed up.)</span>
</p>
  </div></div>
</body>
</html>